Over the past few weeks I have noticed the emergence new entries in my Facebook news feed, consisting of “[Person] likes [inane phrase here]” and a link to websites I had never head of. When I clicked through the link, you end up at a page with just [inane phrase here] on it, a Facebook ‘like’ button, and advertising (the last bit is a lie – most advertising is turned off in my web browser).
It appears that new type of website has emerged, that work like this:
1. Allow a user to enter a random string of text.
2. Put that piece of text into a webpage, and give it a unique URL.
3. Allow user to ‘like’ the piece of inane rambling on Facebook.
4. ???
5. Profit!
Examples of these websites include http://fblike.net/, http://www.fblike.com/, http://mylike.co.uk/superlike/, http://chelick.net.
They seem to have cropped up in the past few weeks since Facebook enabled third party websites to place “Like” buttons on their sites, a feature from April 2010. Does anyone know what this new genre websites should be called?
I call them, unlikeable websites. 😀
They do seem a bit silly, though. My girlfriend had a few on her profile and she didn’t even know they linked to a random site – She just saw some other people liking them, and clicked the “Like” link next to them in her feed. A large number of “Like”d things in my Facebook feed are from those sites.
There’s another type, too – Things that look like phrases (like these sites), but they link to a random picture O_o.
Well I searched quite a lot to find some thoughts about the sites and what was appearing to me to be tricks / scams (whatever you’d like to call it) and came across your post here.
I’ve been noticing a few of the ‘__friend_name___ liked ______’ load of crap in my news feed and been suspicious of them. It is since Google launched the universal ‘like’ button (which I’ve blogged about a few times already and currently compiling notes for a new post).
It is some kind of a trick. But I can’t quite figure it out yet because people are actually clicking the links and clicking ‘like’. How the likes of mylike.co.uk gets going and fools people into ‘liking’ things.
As Daniel said, they use random pictures too which makes the links look like a friend liked something (as depicted) but in fact the picture has nothing to do with the phrase that was liked.
Not so long ago these types of things making an appearance in our news feed were from friends liking actual Facebook content (pages, groups, people) but now it seems the floodgates are opened and the future ain’t looking so bright and rosy over at Facebook.
In a word: B——T.
Turns out “like farm” is the name I was looking for – an article predicting their rise back on April 28, 2010:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/04/facebook_and_google
Today I noticed that Facebook have updated the way 3rd party likes work, it is now “ likes on “, which makes it easier for other people to ignore them.
I’m glad you found a term for these things.
I was going to suggest webshites but that’s really a broad category of which these are only one type.
I expect it’s too late to change things like embedding links in documents instead of externally as in Doug Engelbart & Ted Nelson’s online systems.
But there are many more dead or near useless links than would otherwise be due to commercial influences. And much worse than the dead, the undead that can zombiefy your system.
It’s just a domain name is in a parking station for the domain name! This is to ensure that used to make money on the clicks! And the messages that come to you – it’s spam. The purpose of these reports – more new clicks … More clicks – more money …